The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution

Schmidt Number: S-4832

On-line since: 31st May, 2019

LECTURE V

Dornach, 7th May 1922

Very much more could be said about the present subject;
however, some indications, only, could be given and with these
we must for the moment be satisfied. Today I shall try, by
means of a kind of comprehensive overview, to show how the soul
of man is incorporated into world evolution as a whole.

When we, as ensouled beings between birth and death, let the
external world act upon us, we receive in the first place a
number of impressions. Present-day man has for centuries been
in the habit of regarding the external world as the most
essential; this attitude is largely due to the scientific
education which he receives already from the lower school
onwards. Lately even psychology is dealt with as if it were one
of the natural sciences, not only by the experts but by the
simplest people. This all stems from the fact that modern man
has little talent for examining his own inner being.
Consequently, it is not easy for him to become aware of things
such as those we spoke about yesterday. Present- day man has no
inclination to look into himself objectively; he is not in the
habit of doing so. He is aware of all that which I referred to
yesterday as the up-surging waves of instinctive
life — urges, cravings and passions — in fact, all
emotions in general. But he is little inclined to look at these
in an objective way because when he observes himself all that
emerges are just these cravings. Through education they often
become refined, but it is still instinctive life that wells up.
On the other hand, man forms at least some ideas concerning the
external world in which he is not personally involved; these
ideas therefore have a certain objectivity.

There are many people who do not care for such objective
ideas; they prefer to keep to what is subjective and
personal. However, modern cultural life brings up in
every field such objective concepts concerning external nature
and has done so for centuries. These concepts about the world
fill man's inner being. Whether it is only a little local paper
he reads or one of the Sunday supplements, he is learning, in
both, to look at the world according to such concepts. He is
not aware that, even from the smallest publication, he
absorbs a natural-scientific view of the world, but he
does so nonetheless. So it can be said that the only thing that
really occupies man today is the external world. I am not
saying this in criticism of individuals. It is more a criticism
of the age; or, better said, a characterization of the age, for
there is no point in criticizing. The whole situation is simply
a necessary outcome of the time. People today are so little
interested in man as such that it has become a matter of
indifference whether a living actor is seen on the stage
or a specter on the cinema screen. In reality, it naturally
does make a considerable difference. But today there is no deep
fundamental feeling for this difference. If there were, then
there would also be more concern for the considerable part
played by the cinema and similar phenomena in the decline of
our civilization.

The
concepts which are today imparted to man's soul are simply
accepted through blind faith in authority. When told that
science has achieved this or established that, he is
immediately convinced. One really must be clear about the
fact that utterly blind faith in authority is involved in the
way ideas about the world are conveyed. Things are accepted
simply on the basis of a statement without the slightest
knowledge of what actually takes place in the laboratories and
so on.

It
was by no means always so. I have often drawn attention
to the fact that if we go back in the history of mankind's
evolution, we arrive at a time when something was present in
man which I have always designated as an instinctive, dreamlike
clairvoyance. This clairvoyance was indeed instinctive
and dreamlike, yet far better able to enter into the nature of
things than the so-called scientific ideas of today. Through
those conceptual pictures, which today are considered to
be merely symbolic or allegoric or else flights of fancy, one
was actually transported into the reality of things. Whether a
particular picture corresponded quite exactly to the external
object was not what mattered. Of importance was rather that,
with the picture, one also received the spiritual reality of
the object. Today it is, of course, essential that the idea one
has formed corresponds exactly to the external fact, for
this correspondence is all man has to hold on to.

This touches on something we must be quite clear about because
it is of immense importance for judging our present
civilization. It must be strongly emphasized that, formerly,
man in his instinctive clairvoyance had a living quality within
him. Modern man believes that it was mere fantasy and that it
had nothing to do with external objects.

In
a certain sense, it is of particular importance, if our insight
is firmly rooted in Anthroposophy, that we accept this modern
approach in which, disregarding the inner reality of
external nature, we formulate faithful copies of her. Perhaps
you are aware of how scientifically scrupulous
Anthroposophy does just that, by declining every kind of
hypothesis about the phenomena of nature. On the
contrary, we remain in our phenomenalism, as it must be
termed, strictly within the phenomena themselves — that is,
within what nature conveys — and that we allow the
phenomena to explain themselves, in the Goethean sense.
[Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings.]
We do not think into them all kinds of atom-bombardment or
atom-splitting and the like, as is usually done nowadays
because of the inertia of old habits. When we speak about
external nature, on the basis of Anthroposophy, it is
essential that we do not hypothetically add anything to
what the phenomena themselves reveal.

Modern technology is an example of how not to think anything
into the phenomena. It has arisen with the natural- scientific
world view in recent times. When we utilize nature's laws in
technology we actually create the phenomena ourselves.
True, something is left out of account in the phenomena, in
electricity, for example, of which the modern researcher
says that he uses it, but does not know what it is. He speaks
similarly about all nature forces such as heat and light, etc.
In other words, there is always an element which is not
explained. However, what really matters in technology is
that which we want to control. And as it is we ourselves
who put everything together in the experiments, we can survey
every detail.

It
is just because every detail is surveyable that one can have an
immediate feeling of certainty about what is built up
technically — for example, in chemistry; whereas, when one
turns to nature there is always the possibility of several
interpretations. So it must be said that a thinking which is
truly of our time is to be seen at its most perfect in the
technician. Someone with no inkling as to how a machine or a
chemical product is made, and works does not yet think in the
modern way. He lets other people think in him, as it were;
people who are in the know, who think technically. The external
achievements of technology such as mechanisms, chemistry and so
on, have gradually become the basis for a modem view of the
world. In the course of time this approach has spread to what
is today regarded as a world conception.

What is modern astronomy? For a long time it has
represented nothing but a world mechanism. The way the
sun is seen in relation to the planets and their movements is
nothing but the picture of a huge machine. Lately,
chemistry has been added to this in the form of
spectral-analysis.
[Spectral-analysis:
Chemical analysis by means of spectroscope.
]
Astronomy does not venture further.
This science of the universe is today only concerned with the
question of whether our mental picture of it will correspond to
reality if it is simply built up on concepts taken from
technology; that is, if what can be derived from technology is
imagined transposed into outer space. We should then have a
science, it is thought, containing valid ideas, if one excludes
those of neo-vitalism
[
Neo-vitalism: developed by
Hans Driesch,
1867 — 1941, biologist.
]
and all talk of psychoid
[
Psychoid: Concept of Vitalism. Description of certain strata of soul
(C.G. Jung).
]
nd the like. A
world view would be obtained in which the effectual ideas would
be those applied in chemical preparations and the construction
of machines. These ideas are then carried over to the structure
of the universe and thus represent that, too, as a huge
mechanism in which certain chemical processes occur.

This was not always the view. Right up to the 15th
Century — I am referring to the civilized part of the
world — man lived with mental pictures of the world which
were not merely technical. They were inner pictures in which he
could participate. What is of a technical nature is quite
external to man; it is completely separate from him.
Formerly, man experienced what he knew; he, so to speak, lived
within his knowledge. Modern man does not participate in what
he knows. This is why, nowadays, clever people in particular
feel that man in former times dreamed all kinds of things into
his environment, he indulged in fantasies; whereas today we
have at last the possibility to represent the world to
ourselves without such fantasy. It is even believed that
technical concepts are the only kind that ought to be applied
to the world, because only then can the danger of fantasy be
avoided, and true knowledge obtained.

However, something of a very much more fundamental nature lies
at the basis of what has just been stated; something
which was prophesied already in the ancient mysteries by
initiates who had attained a certain grade. In fact, it is
characteristic of the mysteries, at the time when the ancient
clairvoyance was prevalent, that they prophetically foresaw the
kind of view of the world that was bound to come.

Something like the following was said: If the view of the world
prevalent today — this “today” was in very
early times when man, in an instinctive, dreamlike way,
participated in his environment — is preserved for future
mankind then the human being will never become free. His
impulse to action will always come from his inner experience of
the world. In his heart a divine world will speak, but a divine
world that makes him dependent. People in the ancient
civilizations were always unfree. They were aware that, when
they were not obeying laws of state, laid down by their rulers,
they followed divine commands. They were, so to speak, beings
who simply carried out the impulses prompted by the divine
within them. Therefore, in the mysteries it was said: A time
must come when the divine influence within man must cease. A
time must come when he looks out on an external world and sees
only objects and events that have nothing to do with his
humanity, a world of which he only takes into his soul the
external aspect. Man can be free inwardly just when he
witnesses, and experiences only forces of nature and not those
that sustain him. Then his inner being will be unburdened
because nothing will fill his soul except what is
external to his nature.

A
phase had to come in mankind's evolution when he would see
external nature as something apart from himself and thus
achieve independence. This was foreseen in the ancient
mysteries where the initiate said: What at present we can give
human beings, whose instinctive clairvoyance enables them to
meet us with understanding, will not always be possible to give
to men, because it makes them dependent. Man must acquire
a knowledge which does not determine his inner impulse to
action but leaves him free. A knowledge that only conveys
concepts of what exists outside his being will awaken his inner
impulse to freedom.

This characterizes the extreme problem I was faced with when I
felt impelled to write, first the introductory essays, and then
my Philosophy of Freedom. The fact had to be fully
recognized, with all its implications, that the age in which we
live is completely orientated towards knowledge of a technical
nature. There is no choice but to adapt to this approach;
otherwise the doctrines derived from the instinctive experience
of the world in ancient times, and still preserved in the
creeds and so on, will be distorted. No other possibility
exists than to make use of concepts which are also
applicable to the construction of machinery and so on. We
live in a world that is thought of as a huge machine and as a
huge chemical plant. If we are to find again what is spiritual
in the world then we must simply break completely with
everything that has come down in the form of mysticism from
former times. In the mechanical world, devoid of spirit, given
us by modern science, there we must find the spirit.

Let
me sketch on the blackboard the situation that had to be
reckoned with when I wrote my Philosophy of
Freedom. If this is man (see drawing on the left,
white lines) and this his surrounding world (yellow lines) then
one must depict the situation in ancient times as follows: When
man looked into the environment he experienced — also
within himself — what his instinctive, dreamlike,
clairvoyant pictures transmitted to him (red lines). And
he related his inner experiences to what he saw outside.
Therefore, he perceived the environment as spiritual through
and through (red lines within yellow ones). He saw elemental
and also higher beings in everything, because he brought
towards them the right inner condition.

Modern man of the civilized world, for whom in the early
Nineties I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom, has a
different relation to his environment (drawing on the right).
He no longer unites his inner being with what he perceives; he
focuses on what can be worked out in technical terms. He traces
the laws at work in the environment, but these are laws of
nature and in them no moral impulses are to be found;
whereas man in ancient times, as I drew it here (drawing
on the left), was still inwardly connected with the
environment. He saw in stone, animal, and plant moral
impulses, because everything contained divine spiritual
beings. In the laws of nature there is only what applies to
mechanical construction.

Diagram 1Click image for large view

What then did the Philosophy of Freedom set out to do?
The necessary task to be accomplished was to show that if man
is unable to find moral impulses, when he stands outside
of nature, because through his senses he can reach only natural
laws, then he must go out of himself. He can no longer remain
within the confines of his body. I had to describe this first
going out, when man leaves behind his bodily nature. This first
going out is accomplished in pure thinking in the way it is
described in the Philosophy of Freedom. Here man
does not project himself into the environment by means of
instinctive clairvoyance; he goes out of his body altogether.
He transfers his consciousness into the external world
(green lines). And what does he attain there? He attains moral
intuition because he has reached the very first delicate degree
of clairvoyance — or you may wish to use the subjective
term I used then: moral imagination. Here man goes out of
himself to find within the technical the spiritual — the
spiritual is, after all, within it — where it is first to
be found: in the sphere of morality.

But
people do not recognize that what is described in the
Philosophy of Freedom is the very first degree of the
new clairvoyance. This is not recognized because people
still think that clairvoyance means plunging into something
obscure and unfamiliar. Here it is just the familiar that is
sought; here one goes out with a thinking that has become
independent of matter. It is a thinking that sustains
itself, so that, through this self-sustaining thinking, the
world is grasped for the first time purely spiritually. Indeed,
the world is grasped through the very purest spirituality.

Mystics find in the Philosophy of Freedom too much
emphasis on thinking. According to them it is just too
full of thoughts. Others, such as rationalists and scientists
and even modern philosophers, can make nothing of it for the
very reason that it leads into a realm of spiritual sight where
they do not want to go. They want to remain within the realm of
external sight even when their subject is philosophy. The
whole approach and content of the Philosophy of Freedom
fulfils the obligation placed upon modern man.

This is what in an elementary way can be said in
connection with what was prophetically forecast in the
ancient mysteries. The initiates saw the future situation in
exact details, both in relation to the human soul and also to
world evolution. They saw clearly that the world, which man
would later come to know, would be not only external to man but
also to the Gods. It would be a world outside the realm of that
divine creation about which they — the initiates
— spoke. They sought revelations of the divine through
initiation; thus, they were able to commune with the
Gods. The various heathen peoples communed with their own
divinities. The Jews, for example, with Jahve or Jehovah, and,
insofar as they were initiates, did so not just in thought, but
in actual fact. It is absolutely correct to speak about real
communion with divine beings. The initiates achieved this
within the mysteries. When they and their pupils were in the
outside world they saw the surrounding world, and in it what
their instinctive clairvoyance conveyed. The initiates in
particular and also their pupils knew that the external world
they saw resisted, in a certain sense, what they projected into
it through their clairvoyance. They knew that a time would come
when it would no longer be a question of resistance only, but
one would only see merely that which can be seen without such
projection.

These initiates recognized a truth which modern man would not
have the courage to admit because his knowledge would be too
shallow. The initiates said, “The external world we see
is non-divine unless we project into it what the Gods have
bestowed upon us.” For what they saw within the external
world had been bestowed upon them by the Gods since the
beginning of world evolution. They said, “We have around
us a world which has not originated from the Gods with whom we
commune in the mysteries.”

It
was this which later, in the Middle Ages, led to a
particular form of contempt for nature and to asceticism
and which still is to be found in certain religious
confessions, though often hypercritically. This attitude had
its first beginning in the ancient mysteries when man had to
acknowledge: When I look into my inner being I can
commune with the Gods, but the world I see around me does not
originate from them. This world is not created by those Gods
whom I seek when I go through initiation.

Through initiation within the mysteries it was learned that the
external world had not originated from the Gods. This was
accepted more and more as a fundamental objective truth.
The Gods had intended quite a different world.

A
particular event had caused man to sink down into a world not
at all willed by the Gods. If time allowed, it could be shown
that all ideas concerning the fall of man — his
expulsion from paradise — stem from the recognition
that the world around him is not a world created by the
Gods.

Attempts were made to discover the will of the Gods in regard
to the world they had not created, and it was realized that
what the Gods wanted was the disintegration, the
annihilation of that world. This fact, too, the initiates
in ancient times had to face. The Gods whom they reached up to
revealed that their decision regarding this world was its
destruction. Yet the initiates also knew that man, in order to
become independent, had at some time to derive his human
knowledge precisely from the world which the Gods found ripe
for extinction.

In
the early Greek mysteries this knowledge was understood
in a specific way. There the aim was to interpret the world
through art. At that time there was no inkling of a
natural-scientific approach such as we have today. Through
plastic art and particularly through the Greek tragedy — in
fact, through art in general — the aim was to create
something through man which, though associated with this world,
nevertheless transcended it. The initiated Greek said to
himself: The world I see around me with its trees, its
springs and so on, all this will disintegrate; however, what
from this world has been secreted into a Venus de Milo, a Zeus
or Athene, or into the dramas of Sophocles, will surely pass
over from the realm of the visible into the invisible. The
thoughts which had gone into a work of art would remain and
would secure the continuation of the earthly world — which
otherwise might disappear completely — even if the earth
itself disintegrated.

Already the very early Greeks, at the time when art still
proceeded from the mysteries, visualized that the world must be
saved through art. For the world, though derived from the Gods,
had absorbed a content which the Gods themselves wished
destroyed. Certain fundamental facts of science were fully
known to the initiates; this can be proved even historically.
Certainly we have added much by way of technical construction
in the course of recent centuries, particularly the 19th
Century. But certain fundamental things which are still
operative in technology were well known to the initiates of
old. They knew much more than can be derived from what they
told others who were not initiated. This knowledge led the
initiates in the mysteries to say: If by combining natural
forces we simply put together something technically we
shall have something in the nature of a machine. We shall be
making something which will be destroyed together with that
aspect of the earth which the Gods themselves wish annihilated.
For every initiate knows, and did know, that those Gods they
venerated and communed with in the ancient
mysteries — and with whom one can naturally still
commune — those Gods hate nothing so much as, for example,
a locomotive or a motor car. That to them is something
dreadful. Those Gods say, “Not only must we endure that
Ahriman has made the earth machinelike: now added to
that, human beings are imitating the work of Ahriman. Our task
in destroying Ahriman's endeavors is great enough and now we
have in addition all these steam engines, all these electric
machines and all that trash which has to be destroyed as
well.”

Therefore, the initiate in ancient times said: It is of no help
at all if we simply add to the outer forces of nature, which no
longer contain anything spiritual, by constructing technical
works like machinery or chemicals. The initiates were
absolutely convinced that this was how matters stood and they
decided, therefore, that as much as possible of the world must
be rescued. As mentioned already, in Greece the impulse to do
so was through art. If we go further towards the East people
would say: As far as man's true evolution is concerned,
everything that works according to so-called natural laws has,
in reality, no meaning. The Gods will eventually destroy it. We
shall, therefore, clothe all we do in such a way that the
spiritual can live within it. This is how the cult in its
earliest form originated. The spiritual cannot enter a creation
such as a machine or a chemical, but it can enter the act of
worship. It was considered that what one did should be
something sacramental, something in which the spirit could live
and participate. The aim of the cult was to rescue as much as
possible from earth evolution.

I
have often spoken of this on earlier occasions when I
illustrated it by saying that we must reach a point in
our technical research when the bench in the laboratory
becomes an altar for divine service; so that we perform a
moral-spiritual deed on the bench which in the laboratories of
physics or chemistry has become an altar. I have often spoken
of this; today I approached it more from the historical
aspect.

This was the origin of religious cults to which people are
again returning because they cannot rouse themselves to
spiritual activity. It is remarkable that it is just people of
intelligence who are today returning in great numbers to
the bosom of the Catholic church. They do this for the simple
reason that they want to be saved. They want to stay with what
will remain when the earth disappears without trace, through
the will of the Gods. Little attention is paid to what is
happening in our time; so this present flow of intelligent
people into Catholicism goes on unnoticed. It is happening
because people want to escape from destruction. They want to
participate in something, like the Catholic ceremonies and
Mass, which, resting as they do on very old traditions, will at
least belong to what will remain. It is happening because
people lack the motivation to discover something new and
essential for the future. People lack inner strength because
they have lost it in our technical age.

At
a certain moment it ought to have been realized that our world
of technology is a negative world; it contains no inner
impulses as was formerly the case. It should have been
recognized that now it is necessary to achieve moral
intuition and moral imagination. It is just those who are
blind to this necessity of the age who are now returning to
Catholicism. The explanation lies in the weakness of our
time.

That this situation would arise was known to the initiates in
ancient times. They asked themselves: What is going to happen?
We know that the Gods with whom we commune in the mysteries
want the destruction of the earth. But if human beings are to
become free and independent they must of necessity become ever
more like the things of earth. Only through technical knowledge
can man become free. If the initiates of old could have
foreseen no more than this, they would have faced a dreadful
prophetic revelation. They would have foreseen that man, in
order to become truly man, had to entangle himself completely
in the Ahrimanic world bereft of God, and must turn to dust
with the earth when the Gods dissolve it. Men themselves would
gradually become mechanisms, become ever more like machines.
Eventually, only technical impulses would activate their
thoughts. Astronomy is basically nothing but thoughts about a
huge world machine. Man's thoughts concerning astronomy are of
a mechanical nature. If the thoughts are of the same technical
pattern it ultimately makes no difference whether one thinks of
nuts and bolts or about Venus and Mercury.

But
in the mysteries, prophetically, something else was foreseen
before it happened on earth: the Mystery of Golgotha.
Once it had taken place it would gradually be understood
more and more. This the initiates in ancient times learned from
their Gods with whom they communed. The Gods knew all things;
from them the initiates could receive an all-embracing wisdom.
But there was one thing they could never learn from these Gods;
they could never learn anything relating to birth and death.
Particularly about death the Gods knew nothing. But in the
mysteries, it was known that the God who was later called the
Christ would come down, and that on earth he would know death.
Thus, the Mystery of Golgotha consists of the fact that one of
the Gods, who till then had known neither death nor birth and
heredity, would learn to know death. Through knowing death, he
could unite with earth evolution and create a
counterweight to what necessarily had to happen for the
development of freedom: the ever-increasing union of man
with the disintegrating earth. Man can now create in himself
the counterweight. He must, on the one hand, devote himself
completely to modern cognition, really take into himself modern
natural-scientific knowledge; yet, on the other hand, turn to
the God who has come to know death and birth — the Christ.
Now it is possible for man to incline fully towards what is
necessary for attaining freedom; but he must, on the other
hand, find the counterweight by balancing this knowledge
with that of the other realm. He must find the path leading to
the Pauline saying, “Not I, but the Christ in me.”
Then man will again find the possibility, through pervading the
world with his Christianized thinking, to transform from
within himself what must otherwise fall away from the world of
the Gods, to which man, in reality, belongs.

Thus, the Ahrimanic powers, active on earth in what is
disintegrating, are being opposed by the Christ, Who through an
extra-earthly decision of the Gods is now active in the earth.
It was not necessary for him to become free; He is a God and
remains a God after going through death. He does not become
akin to the earth. He lives as a God within the being of the
earth. As a consequence, man now has the possibility to restore
the balance by the development of freedom. He can go to
the highest limit of individualism; for only in individual man
can moral imagination be attained.

My
Philosophy of Freedom has been called the most extreme
philosophy of individualism. It cannot be anything else because
it is the most Christian of philosophies. Thus, one must place
on one side of the scales everything that can be attained
through knowledge of the laws of nature, which can only be
penetrated with spirituality by ascending to pure independent
thinking. Independent thinking can still be restored within
pure technical knowledge. However, there must be placed on the
other side of the scales a true recognition of Christ, a real
understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It
was, therefore, a matter of course that I wrote, on the one
hand, the Philosophy of Freedom and, on the other, found
it essential to point to the Mystery of Golgotha in my
Christianity as Mystical Fact and Mysticism at the
Dawn of the Modem Age. These two things simply belong
together. Yet there are people who superficially see a
contradiction in these two kinds of books. To them it is as if
meat were placed on one scale and a weight on the other and
they exclaim: What nonsense — these two things belong
together. In short, everything must be mixed up. So, they take
the weights and put them with the meat. Well, you do not get
balance that way. Yet that is the way of modern critics. Having
placed mysticism on one side and philosophy on the other they
proceed to mix them together. But if modern man wants to
stand in the right way within world evolution then there must
live in his soul, on the one hand, a strong impulse towards
freedom, towards independence, and, on the other, a strong
impulse towards a deep inner experience of the Mystery of
Golgotha.

This must gradually develop in the life of the individual and
must also be developed in the sciences. The individual must
overcome the old instinctive mysticism and clairvoyance.
He must rely solely on knowledge of the kind needed for
understanding, say, how a steam engine works. In my

Philosophy of Freedom, when I spoke of knowledge of
external nature, I presupposed only the kind of concepts
needed for understanding a steam engine. However, in order to
understand a steam engine, one must set aside one's whole human
personality except for the very last: pure thinking. The latter
must be inwardly cultivated and then carried outside into
the object, where it will be found to exist already.

Thus, one can take one's stand fully on the ground of freedom
provided one also stands fully on the ground of the Christ
fact. This applies also to science. And it will be seen to
apply when it is realized that, no matter how extensively
external nature is investigated according to Haeckel,
[Ernst Haeckel,
1834-1919. Natural scientist. Founder of Monism. Defender of Darwin's Origin of Species.
]
something is always left unexplained, something always
remains which cannot be understood with concepts of that kind.
Let me put it somewhat more strongly: We are, after all,
earnest people who have come together to understand something
and not to enjoy five o'clock tea. So let me put it this way:
The two things of which I have spoken must enter civilization
in the right manner. In earlier times, when one was aware
through instinctive clairvoyance of man's connection with the
spiritual in the external world, it led to depicting the halo.
The halo was particularly cultivated in very early times,
appearing frequently in many different forms, even in the cult
itself. With the approach of the Middle Ages and the first
awakening of materialism there was a preference for depicting
something else: the pregnant woman. Just look at the many
pictures from the Middle Ages in which all the women are
pregnant. So, you have, on the one hand, the halo which is the
loftiest proclamation of the spiritual world and points to
man's salvation after death, and, on the other, what points to
that which again and again brings man into the physical
world — birth.

This is all related to man's inner spiritual drive towards
evolution, which is always alive in his soul. Thus, there is a
connection, even in regard to the most intimate facts,
between soul experiences and world evolution. Science
must gradually accommodate itself to this situation and
recognize that however minutely the world is scrutinized
according to Haeckel's concepts, two things remain unexplained:
one is death, the other birth. The kind of ideas that explain
chemistry and machinery — i.e., ideas applicable to
technical constructions — can never explain birth and
death. Death and birth are the two portals that lead out beyond
the physical and must be approached with a different kind of
observation. As long as one is concerned with the
question of freedom one can remain within the ideas that
also apply in technology. And when one writes a Philosophy
of Freedom one writes it for people who have reached their
middle years — naturally not for children, they cannot be
free, for in them the divine is still active, they are
unfree — only with the middle years does one become free.
When one begins to write about the other aspect one immediately
becomes concerned with man's comprehension of death.
Therefore, you will find that the very first chapters of my
writings on mysticism deal with the archetypal mystery of
earth: namely, death and the intimate experience of death
and spiritual rebirth.

When the present-day world is contemplated one cannot but
recognize the need for the things I have described. There is
nothing nebulous about it; the need is comprehensible
through and through. It must, therefore, be said that the soul
in its striving towards freedom brushes against the Ahrimanic.
In the soul's religious experiences, even when they concern the
Mystery of Golgotha, it comes very near the Luciferic. If
egoistical religious instincts alone are cultivated, which is
often the case today, it is all too easy to cultivate Luciferic
instincts and desires as well.

This is what in the immediate present must concern the human
soul; it is also what Christ taught his intimate
disciples directly after the Resurrection. His intimate
disciples were successors of the initiates of old. They were to
teach that He had descended from the world of the Gods who did
not yet know death, and who therefore in primordial times could
tell man nothing about death. They were to teach that Christ
had descended in order to experience the mystery of birth and
death. Teachings about the birth and death of Christ have
remained so obscure because human beings could not find a way
to explain these things. Yet after the Resurrection, in the
original Christian mysteries, Christ Himself imparted to His
first initiated pupils the secret of a God's learning about
earthly death. In their true form the Christian mysteries
disappeared already in the Fourth Century. They
disappeared because the impulse to freedom had to be developed
first. However, the original wisdom had already been imparted
to man by the ancient Gods. It had increasingly been
transmitted to later generations, becoming all the time more
diluted. What Christ imparted to His intimate disciples after
the Resurrection was the original revelation concerning the
meaning of earth evolution. This revelation was the spiritual
foundation for the further life of the human soul. What the
ancient Gods had taught in the mysteries was basically
the secrets of Saturn, Sun and Moon. The essential secret of
the Earth could be imparted to the human soul only after this
secret had been experienced by a God on earth through the
Mystery of Golgotha. Birth and death, in the human sense, did
not occur until the earth evolution. Previously only
metamorphosis and transformation took place.

Thus, the most fundamental revelation after the death of Christ
is at the same time the foundation from which the human soul
can set out to accomplish the salvation of earthly
life.

You
see how human souls are connected in manifold ways with the
evolution of the earth, indeed with the evolution of the
world as a whole, not only through the various
facts I have presented to you during the last few days, but
above all through their understanding of the Mystery of
Golgotha. This is what I wished to impart to you in these
lectures.